1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to displaying data on the internet, and more particularly to dynamically expanding and collapsing a tree view for an HTML web interface.
2. Description of Related Art
Web browser technology has propelled the internet to what has now become a pervasive and nearly universal superhighway whereby a wealth of information can be readily retrieved and delivered to any requesting end user. As the level of activities on the internet increases, more and more information is available for search and viewing by the end user. Despite efforts to index and catalog this wealth of information, information access and subsequent visual access is one of the main challenges in developing a web based application server presently. In the internet environment, the successful implementation of the web application server is determined by how the information that resides on the server can be effectively presented or conveyed to the users. Although much of the data that resides on various servers has hierarchical properties, allowing users to traverse the server and access the hierarchical information is a difficult task. To achieve this, it takes web administrators a tremendous amount of time and effort to create and maintain a tree structured interface. This is primarily due to the rapid information changes on the server, the real time requirements of the users and limitations inherent in Hypertext Markup Language or HTML.
Wittenburg et all, "Visual Focusing and Transition Techniques in a Treeviewer for Web Information Access", IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Sep. 23-26, 1997 at page 20, Column 2 discusses the problem, stating "Yahoo"(http://www.yahoo.com) is a good representative of a design implemented in HTML. The presentation of search hits is augmented with HTML links representing paths of its large classification tree from the root down to local categories under which hits appear. This helps to organize the hit sets and to yield a context for evaluating their relevance. However, when users try to directly interact with the category tree itself, say by opening or closing its branches, only one level of the tree is visible at a time and an entirely new HTML page must be rendered. Maintenance of any other context information, say, the current hit set, is not done across views. Even though users can constrain their search to a single branch of the category tree, they cannot control or define multiple foci within a single view.
Prior art technologies using HTML to present the visual display of the information are static and administratively difficult to maintain, while those using JAVA are browser dependent and slow or inefficient to execute. Therefore, there is a need for an efficient and rapid access to the wealth of information on the world wide web that addresses the complexities of displaying the data while meeting the real time needs of the end user.